My first NAS

After 2 lost drives I decided to create some kind of NAS for myself and my girlfriend.

My first (external) drive, a Buffalo Drive Station 500 GB I lost because it just overturned when it was on my table. Instantly all files gone, drive lost.
My second (internal) drive, connected to some nude circuit board with SATA2 interface and USB2 connectivity, I lost when a cat decided to touch it with his paw. Instantly all files gone again.

My third drive, a Western Digital Green 1 TB, is just about to die right now. So now there is my NAS. Currently only with 1 data drive:

Disks currently installed
- an old Samsung 2,5" 160 GB for OMV (will be replaced by a Western Digital Scorpio 80 GB because my Samsung has 1 damaged sector)
- Western Digital Green 1 TB (45% used)
- Seagate IronWolf 2 TB (Western Digital Green has over 1000 damaged sectors, so it will be replaced by a second IronWolf soon)

Have mercy with me, I am totally new to NAS. All I want is to not lose again my data because of stupidity.

I'm careful using terms like Backup, RAID, etc because I don't know them correctly.

Ok, given you seem to walk the 'RAID route' for whatever reasons ('I wanted to buy one with 6x SATA') I would strongly recommend to check/implement backup first and to keep complexity as low as possible.

We have every other day a new 'Oops, my RAID array has gone thread' here, inexperienced users do stuff those with some knowledge/experience can not even imagine (eg. saving the time/efforts for testing, testing and again testing especially once the setups get complex) and I would also recommend to implement an automated backup with some sort of physical separation.

I personally implement this with small ARM devices and 2.5" disks here and there that automatically backup my main device (a laptop) once I visit the specific locations. But even a simple 1:1 mirroring with rsync to another disk device in another room is IMO better than everything in one place and doing manual disk clones only from time to time.

So, what do you recommend? Currently I am backing up all my files to another drive. It's still rsync-ing. I'm not sure but it should be done in about 1 hour or so. Normally I don't like RAID. I never liked it. Mirroring is nice but it also mirrors eventually given issues instantly.

But even a simple 1:1 mirroring with rsync to another disk device in another room is IMO better than everything in one place and doing manual disk clones only from time to time. wrote:

What do you mean with this exactly with another room? I mean.. my NAS is in the same room than my PC for work.

Mirroring is nice but it also mirrors eventually given issues instantly.

Exactly, it's almost as useless as RAID-1 since just mirroring with some delay.

In the past we did use rsync but added versioning on top (web search for 'rsync rotating backup hardlinks' should be sufficient) but switched in the meantime to way more better approaches (using snapshot features from ZFS/btrfs and sending them incrementially to another disk/host) but I fear this requires some skills to get this working in a reliable way without wasting too much time in becoming an 'storage expert' (though znapzend seems pretty easy to me but I do this too often).

OMV supports some pretty good backup solutions as plugins... I don't know that much about so I step back now for others to jump in

The rsnapshot-plugin creates in a simple way snapshots on a hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis (or any combination of this, you like). So you can roll back in time and restore previous versions. For files that have not changed hardlinks are used, so the snapshot takes little extra place on your disk. You can search for rsnapshot in Wikipedia for more detailed description.

One advantage of rsnapshot is, if you delete a file accidentally you can restore it from the snapshot. If you use RAID 1 (or Mirror) the file will be deleted also on the second drive.

There is also a USB-Backup plugin. It copys shared folders as soon as a USB drive is plugged in to the USB port. Very usefull to make a backup on a protable drive so you can store it in a different location. This strategy helps to prevent you from data loss in case of fire or flooding when probably all drives you have in your home will be gone.

I started long time ago to develope my own backup/sync/mirror/whatever software for data backup. Works perfectly with my Samba-Shares.

Still suggest you have a look at urbackup.org. The backup runs in the background and you hardly notice is. Very little system ressources used. You can backup your files but also the complete drive. The drive you can restore from bare metal (so for system drives you do not have to install the operating system first, but you can restore directly from the backup made by UrBackup).

I'm also in the process of figuring out the best solutions to configure my NAS.
At the moment I have 4 disks pooled with unionfs dedicated to data and 1 SSD for OMV system and config directories for the 2 docker containers I run (plex server and rutorrent).
The 4 disks have mainly media data. I'm backing up to a couple of external drives only the most important stuff that I don't want/can lose.
Soon I will try to use snapraid adding another drive to use as parity (most of the data is in large files) so that in case one of the 4 disks die I can recover the data from that disk using the parity disk. I'm also running weekly smart tests to check if the drives are ok and in the case one gives some bad signs I would switch it right away.
The problem will be that if I add another disk for parity I will have used the 6 SATA ports I have on the MB so I will have to buy a PCI or PCI-E card to add more ports but I really don't have any idea if they will work with OMV and which one to buy.

Damn I've just read that the maximum HDD size is 4TB but I have only 8TB drives.

Huh? What are you talking about?

Edit: micom.net/Downloads/Drive%20Size%20Limits.htm (there is no 4TiB limitation, if a disk controller can handle more than 2TiB -- all SATA controllers can -- everything is fine. SATA means LBA48 so the next potential barrier is far away. And running into the 2TiB limitation is also pretty hard these days. The 'best' chance is to use old/crappy USB enclosures that show the usual 32-bit integer overflow)